Google's YouTube has launched an official visionOS app.

While it was already possible to access YouTube on Apple Vision Pro headsets through the Safari web browser, the new official app offers a streamlined native-feeling interface, support for watching 180° and 360° immersive video (including 3D), and, for YouTube Premium subscribers, the ability to download videos for offline viewing.

The player also adapts to the varying aspect ratios of videos on YouTube, avoiding the black-bars problem and revealing more of your real or virtual environment.

On the M5 Apple Vision Pro, the app supports up to 8K, while the original M2 Vision Pro is limited to 4K.

YouTube first announced that it planned to build a visionOS app just days after the original headset's launch.

In the two years since, multiple third-party apps have emerged to fill the gap, including firstly and most prominently the $5 app Juno, built by the same developer as the Apollo phone app for Reddit. But in late 2024 YouTube forced Juno off the visionOS App Store.

Other third-party offerings include Tubular Pro, which has advanced features including SponsorBlock integration and its own theater environments.

The official YouTube app for Apple Vision Pro is available for free on the visionOS App Store, with offline downloads enabled by a YouTube Premium subscription.

While its arrival on visionOS could be considered surprising by some because of Google's competing Android XR, YouTube operates somewhat independently from Google, and Google has offered iOS versions of its most popular services for almost two decades now.

YouTube is also available on Meta's Horizon OS, including with co-watching support, but the app on Quest is visually less polished compared to visionOS and Android XR.

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Meta and EssilorLuxottica sold more than 7 million smart glasses in 2025, and they were the "dominant driver" of the Ray-Ban owner's wholesale growth in H2.

Exactly one year ago, EssilorLuxottica told its investors that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses had sold 2 million units so far, a period spanning from the launch in October 2023 until February 2025.

Now, during its Q4 2025 earnings report, the company announced that it sold 7 million units of Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses in 2025 alone – meaning more than triple that of 2024. This suggests that around 9 million have been sold to date since the launch of Ray-Ban Meta two and a half years ago.

For comparison, Quest 2 sold an estimated 20 million units in two and a half years, while Steam Deck sold around 4 million units over the same timespan.

EssilorLuxottica says smart glasses drove significant growth for both its wholesale and retail business, describing the former in North America as "exponential".

The sales figure comes one month after Bloomberg reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica were discussing doubling or even tripling smart glasses production capacity.

When announcing the 2 million sales mark a year ago, EssilorLuxottica told investors that it planned to increase annual production capacity to 10 million units by the end of 2026, citing the "great success" of the product. Bloomberg's report suggests that target is being increased to 20 or 30 million.

It's undeniable at this point that smart glasses are an appealing consumer product. The question now is whether Meta will maintain its lead once serious competition from Apple and Google arrives.

Google has repeatedly teased smart glasses with a HUD at events like TED and I/O, and announced last year that it's working with the eyewear companies Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on Gemini smart glasses, and will work with Kering Eyewear in the future. Multiple South Korean news outlets have reported that Samsung plans to launch a Meta Ray-Ban Display competitor this year, powered by Google software, a similar strategy to the Galaxy XR headset.

Meanwhile, in October Bloomberg reported that Apple moved staff off the cheaper and lighter Vision headset project to prioritize shipping smart glasses sooner. Apple's first glasses could be revealed as soon as this year ahead of a release in 2027, the report claimed.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says that, as with all new headsets, the company will "learn from" Steam Frame if it's successful.

During an "ask my anything" session on his Instagram page, when asked whether Meta will be in competition with Steam Frame or "support" it, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth replied by saying that it's "a little bit of both".

"It is a little bit of both. I have said this before—and I will say it again, because it is really true—every time there is a new headset, we learn from it. We learn how consumers respond to the decisions made regarding architecture, resolution, and cameras. For example, with the Steam Frame, it looks like they included a wireless dongle. We experimented with a dongle many times to make a wireless link work, but we decided it was just too much hassle. They chose to go that route. If consumers love it, maybe there is a bigger market there than we realized.

Every time someone launches something new, it is an experiment that costs me nothing, which is great. Obviously, we do compete with them. Quite a few people use Quest specifically because it is not just standalone, but also capable of PC gaming. I think that is a strong value proposition: being able to use the device both with a PC and without one. However, Steam is trying to build an entire ecosystem, including portable PCs. So, ultimately, it is a little bit of both."

Bosworth has given a relatively similar answer for past VR headsets and accessories, suggesting that Meta will assess it based on how consumers respond, i.e. how well it sells. For example, he once claimed that if the Pico Trackers sold exceptionally well, Meta would "have to" make an equivalent.

"Every time someone launches something new, it is an experiment that costs me nothing, which is great", Bosworth quips in the Steam Frame response.

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The Meta CTO specifically points out Steam Frame's included wireless dongle as something his company tried in the past but "decided it was just too much hassle".

In late 2022, Meta partnered with D-Link to ship VR Air Bridge, a $100 official accessory for gaming PCs to directly connect to Quest 2 for Air Link, a somewhat similar concept. But whereas Steam Frame itself creates the hotspot that its dongle seamlessly connects to, and the headset has a dedicated 6 GHz radio for this, VR Air Bridge was a decidedly lower-effort approach, a traditional 5 GHz hotspot with a somewhat clunky setup process.

Is Bosworth right that a dongle is "too much hassle", or as with Quest Pro, is this another example of Meta deciding that a general idea is bad because its specific implementation was poor?

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth claims that even after the cuts, the company is still investing more in VR content than anyone else, and more than it was 4 years ago.

If you somehow missed it: last month Meta shut down three of its acquired VR game studios, conducted significant layoffs at a fourth, canceled the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering. These actions came a month after the company officially confirmed "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables".

Despite this, when asked to provide "the truth" about "doom and gloom" for Quest during an "ask me anything" session on his Instagram page, Bosworth responded by claiming that Meta is still investing more in VR content than any other company – and more than it was in 2022, at the height of the Quest 2 era.

"There is a lot of doom and gloom about it—mostly overwrought, but I understand why it exists. Emotionally, we have to navigate two realities. First, there is a real cause for sadness. We had people doing work we were excited about, whether at the OS layer or great studios delivering great titles. Ultimately, we realized that the integrated vision we were pursuing with Horizon and VR was overwrought, and the investment we put in was larger than the growth of the ecosystem allowed. That is a real loss, and we are allowed to feel sad about those things.

On the other side, Meta remains extremely bullish on VR. Adjusting our investment profile was done specifically so that we could continue to invest. We are still investing more in content than anyone else, and more than we were four years ago. While we have receded from the "high water mark," we are still very much a net positive investor in the ecosystem. Furthermore, these internal changes unblock roadmaps for us on hardware; the next two devices we are looking at are very exciting.

I don't want to take away from the sadness regarding cancelled projects like another Arkham, though I wish there was more appreciation for the fact that we got the first one. Regarding community accountability and my December AMA comments about wearables versus VR: I noted then that these areas are separate and we can do both. That remains true. If VR were growing at the rate we wished, we likely wouldn't have made these changes, but we cannot invest infinitely. Our investment must match the size of the growth. The ecosystem is growing—just more slowly than we hoped—and we are still investing. That is the story."

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Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey made a similar claim last month, but Bosworth saying it serves as an official proclamation from Meta itself.

Still, with most of its acquired VR gaming studios now closed, that "content" investment will not be arriving in the form of first-party blockbusters. Instead, Bosworth is likely referring to investment in third-party VR content.

In an interview with Axios last month, Bosworth said that Meta will now
"focus a lot more on the third-party content library, the ecosystem that's developed there".

Whether or not Meta will follow through on this suggestion of continuing to fund third-party VR content remains to be seen.